The second youngest, and last girl, of seven children, Meagan Segal was born in Anaheim, California in February of 1986. The daughter of a doctor and a nurse, she developed a love of art early on, a genetic hand-me-down from her late paternal grandfather. With support and encouragement from her parents, she began exploring the vast creative world, landing at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 2004.
As a painting major, Pratt is where Meagan began to delve deeper into her inspiration, and explored how and why she should express the results. Ultimately, she had to look no further than her own upbringing. Surrounded by medical imagery and doctor shoptalk, yet simultaneously never having an ache or pain that was taken seriously, Meagan’s interest in the anatomy and physiology of the human body to develop along with a good dose of hypochondriacism. Since a child, Meagan often distrusted her body, not believing that it could function independent of her help. She thought of bodies as fragile equilibriums, where there are too many things that can go wrong, and what is to stop them from doing so?
This investigation in combination with her attraction to all things visceral is what led her to begin a series of hyper-realistic still lifes in oil. She was increasingly drawn to such imagery, attracted to the luscious colors, slimy surfaces, dripping fluids, overall squishiness. However, she could not abandon her other love of all things pretty and delicate, and so worked in ornate patterns and dramatic lighting, a la the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century. The result was an intrigue fed by the fine line between the grotesque and the beautiful, the relationship between repulsion and fascination.
She has continued to follow this vision for several years, through the completion of her BFA from Pratt in 2008 and her subsequent return to Los Angeles, and the work has evolved along the way. Of late, Meagan has begun a series of works on paper, working in a more illustrative style, combining anatomic souvenirs with lavish flourishes and flora, free of an environment or any indication of dimensionality outside of the objects themselves. Romantic Baroque textiles and furnishings, along with Victorian illustrations of specimens and natural curiosities, were the archetype for this manner of portrayal. While the imagery is certainly less startling and gory, the desire of expression remains the same: to depict these fragments of our internal make-up as being every bit as beautiful and worthy of investigation and veneration as any other commonly admired subject or object.
